Murray Ceff's Blog

I was sitting with my daughter Miriam in Sacrament meeting on General Conference weekend (that's how we do it in Australia - we watch conference the week after it is held in Salt Lake), when Bishop Sandford made the announcement about the changes to the required ages for missionary calls. (See here  for the official announcement from Church headquarters.) In a nutshell - boys can now go when 18 years of age and girls can now go at 19. Miriam leaned over to me straight away and said something like "Dad, I can go now!" Well, not now, she is only 15, but it now means she can plan to go when she is 19. Like many young women in the Church, missionary service has been seen as something that the boys do, and the girls sort of want to do but don't want to wait till when they are old - 21! I was so glad to hear this news. Both the announcement and Miriam's reaction to it. I have seen girls leave the Church too often in those last teen years. The focus in Young Women...

My current work schedule is a bit crazy (two jobs and my own business ensure that) so I don't always have a handle on what is happening at home. This morning (Sunday morning) Margot was about to leave to attend Pt Cook Ward, which started at 9.00am (she is in the Stake Relief Society Presidency).  "Lets have family prayer before you go. Is Miriam awake?" I asked as I started walking towards our daughters room. "She is on Young Women's camp this weekend", Margot reminded me. I had earlier sent a text message to the Bishopric excusing myself from attending the Ward Priesthood Executive Meeting at 8.00am, as I would need to bring Miriam to Church with me later. So I felt a bit absent minded when Margot told me that Miriam was not home and I could have gone to the meeting that I was meant to be at, and actually enjoy being at! Which brings me to the point of why I write this blog. I don't really write it for anybody else's benefit than my own. But ...

Learning to like a city of 36 million inhabitants is pretty easy actually. Easier than one would expect. When I say I like Tokyo, it does not mean I would like to live there, but I would certainly like to visit there again. The reason I would like to visit there again is simply the Kamota family. As I mentioned in my previous post, Uichi Kamota, the patriarch of the Kamota family, met us at the airport and drove us to his home, two and a half hours across the world's biggest city. We stayed the next three nights in the Kamota's home and enjoyed true Japanese hospitality. Margot originally got to know the Kamota family when they lived in Sydney many years ago while Uichi was working in Australia for Komatsu. While they lived in Sydney they employed Margot to be an English tutor for their second son Keisuke, who was only about five years old at the time. They developed a close bond with Margot and they have kept in touch with each other over the years. A few years ago they ca...

We left London early on a Wednesday morning from Heathrow Airport. It was an interesting drive to the  airport with an Iraqi taxi driver. I think I learnt more about Iraq in that drive than I had ever learned before. One thing I learned was that most Islamic terrorists are Sunni and not Shiite. Anyway, we got to the airport safely which is the main thing, I guess!  Our flight from London to Frankfurt was delayed for some unknown reason. This was going to cause a problem! We had a short flight to Frankfurt where we were to change planes to then fly to Tokyo. It was a short flight to Frankfurt but the distance from where our plane came in (not to a terminal but to a waiting bus on the tarmac) to where our connecting flight was leaving from was far from short! From where the bus dropped us off we had a long long walk and it seemed like not enough time to get to our connecting flight.  Poor Josie! She was really struggling to walk fast enough! Miriam and I went ah...

Not my work - I was sent this in an email recently and thought it was worth keeping and sharing. Top Ten Reasons To Dislike Mitt Romey            1. Drop-dead, collar-ad handsome with gracious, statesmanlike aura. Looks like every central casting's #1 choice for Commander-in-Chief.            2. Been married to ONE woman his entire life, and has been faithful to her, including through her bouts with breast cancer and MS.             3. No scandals or skeletons in his closet. (How boring is that?)             4. Can't speak in a fake, southern, "black preacher voice" when necessary.             5. Highly intelligent. Graduated cum laude from both Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School ... and by t...

We had a very busy day and a half in London. We left the airport via bus for our apartment  in the Hyde Park area of London. The bus actually took us to a bus terminal and then we got a private cab from the bus terminal to the apartment. We booked the apartment with our travel agent in Geelong, and had very little idea what it was like. At $300.00AUD a night it was way cheaper than a hotel, and if it was just Margot, Miriam and me it would have been okay, but it did present some difficulties for poor Josie. The problem was the access to the bathroom. The unit had a kitchen and living area downstairs with a couple of sofa beds. The main bed for Margot and me was on  a mezzanine floor. The access to this floor was via a staircase that was more like a ladder. This was just fine for us two. The problem was that the bathroom was up there too, and it was just not possible for Josie to get up there. We went back to the office and explained the situation to them. There was nothi...

At the end of my last entry here I was about to go through customs and immigration at Heathrow. I got through OK even though I could not remember the exact address of the London Temple, where I would be staying for a for a week. Filling in the immigration card, I had learned through experience, is a pretty straight forward affair, as long as you have an address that you will be staying at in the country you are entering. Last time I went to London I didn't have an address as I was staying with a friend (Neil Kearney) who lived there at the time. I had to convince the immigration official that there was a friend meeting me at the airport who I would be staying with and I didn't need to know his address as Neil did know his address and would take me straight there! Anyway, this time filling out the card, I got thrown a bit as I was sure I had the address of the London Temple written down somewhere, but do you think I could find it? So I just sort of made ...

Impressions of China and Hong Kong Where do I start? What was meant to be a family holiday for the Ceff family in the US, turned in to a brief 4 day stopover in Hong Kong and China for me, on my way to London, to meet up with Margot, Miriam and Josie. My intial impression of Hong Kong, arriving late on Wednesday night, was the very organized way they cope with foreign visitors. From the airport, an express train took me to Kowloon Station, just stopping once along the way. Then at the train station there was a free shuttle bus that took visitors directly to their hotels, and of course there were always staff looking for confused foreigners who did not know their way around. I was actually very fortunate on the flight from Melbourne to Hong Kong to sit beside a young English lady, named Sara, who lives in Hong Kong. She treated me like an elderly gentleman and made sure I got through immigration properly and then made sure I knew where to get on a train. So I was dro...